Wednesday, 13 June 2012

One of the bugs I encountered after upgrading to Fedora 17 is that my music library seemed to have disappeared in Rhythmbox. In fact, everything appeared in the Missing Files view. The strange thing is that all the files appeared exactly where Rhythmbox thought they should be. In fact, I could even play them directly from the Missing Files view!

Anyway, after a bit of searching, it appears that I am facing this bug. You see, on my laptop, I encrypt the /home directory. Back on Fedora 16, some bug in gvfs or udisks caused things to think that that directory was a removable partition. Something must have been fixed in Fedora 17, because it's no longer marked that way (which is good, because I hate seeing it in nautilus.) However, Rhythmbox still thinks those files should be on a separate partition and doesn't correctly update itself (the aforementioned bug.)

This is pretty easy to fix, in fact. Since /home is now no longer considered a separate mount point, you just have to remove those indicators from Rhythmbox's config. The config is an XML file that's been pretty-printed, so the offending information appears on a single line (per file entry). That makes fixing it a pretty simple thing to do:

Friday, 8 June 2012

So, a new release of Fedora was set free just last week, the so-called "Beefy Miracle". A couple of releases ago (or maybe last release), I had really thought I might wait at least a month after a release before upgrading. Turns out my curiosity got the best of me, and I went and upgraded my laptop mere days after the release.

Fortunately, this release has been much much better right out of the box. Having read the release notes, I was prepared for the one major bug, namely the kernel being stuck at an old version. Since it only affected shutdown, it wasn't too big of a deal, just a bit annoying.

Being the third release with GNOME3, it's finally starting to come together into something usable. With the right extensions, it's even better than GNOME2 was. I can't say exactly what changes went into it, but I guess it's a lot of behind the scenes changes to make things Just Work.

There are still a few things that need work, of course. I'm still not a big fan of the grey theme, but at least the window decoration is not huge anymore. It's still a bit difficult to find good complete themes that fix that. Also, it seems they introduced a fade-out of windows that are not in focus. It's sort of like it's disabled-in-appearance-only. I'm sort of yes-no on this change. It seems like it might be good for accessibility, but they don't seem to have tried this out all too much. Sometimes widgets remain faded even when the rest of the application is back in focus. Using some dialogs (like gedit's Replace) do weird things.

One last point is going to be about the wallpaper. I know I don't see it all too much, but the last three releases have had wallpapers that are really quite nice. Fedora's wallpapers have been traditionally mostly blue, the trademark colour. This one deviates a bit with a splash of pink, but I think it's just enough to make it pop. And who could not like fireworks?